For anyone still trying to sort Derrida out, here's a hopefully helpful attempt at explication from Rick Roderick. I liked Roderick's approach in directly opposing Derrida's theory to the "Theory of Reference." This is an allusion to Gottlob Frege, who was discussed in an earlier PEL episode.
I found it impossible to follow Roderick's argument toward the end of the lecture, until I tracked down the Derrida essay to which he was referring, White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy. (After you open the online PDF file, do an on-screen text search for "The breath is seated," and you'll find the relevant passage.)
-Daniel Horne
dmf says
March 5, 2012 at 8:37 ama bit of background/bio info in relation to his work on violence/oppression:
http://www.historiesofviolence.com/theory/derrida/
dmf says
March 5, 2012 at 9:43 amthis is a good lecture to the degree that it makes some vital themes like the inability to fix meanings available to the audience but it won’t likely help anyone to read Derrida (a task probably well beyond lecturing) for themselves.
He does a good job with what Derrida takes away but misses what Derrida champions like Justice,Hospitality, etc, and this gets to the point of do words/concepts gain their meaning from use (roughly Rorty’s position) and so we are at the end of Philosophy, or do concepts have some kind of autonomous/quasi-transcendental aspect (even if only as traces/spectres) that makes Philosophy something more than a study of uses/human-doings?
David Buchanan says
March 5, 2012 at 12:11 pmRoderick’s lecture gave me the same impression as the reading (Structure, Sign and Play). How do we think about language after the end of metaphysics? After 25 centuries of failure, there is a shift away from the metaphysics of “presence”. Where Derrida says, “the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center,” Roderick will say that throughout this history we’ve been trying to fill in the blank in a sentence that reads, “Being is _________”. The history of metaphysics, Derrida says, is the history of metaphors for this center. The names related to these centers have always designated the constant of a presence, he says, and lists examples like essence, existence, substance, subject, truth, consciousness, God, man, and so forth. None of these ultimate truths have ever been found and Derrida wants to show how this relates to the work that language can and cannot do. As Roderick points out, this is not a theory of language, per se, because that’s going to be yet another metaphysical center. So he merely has a “take” on language. No fixed meanings, no correspondence to the referents, no final reading, etc.. And this is where his critics start howling about relativism.
I wonder if, in French, the phrase “White mythology” contains some kind of pun or double meaning so that it also means “Blank mythology”.
Daniel Horne says
March 5, 2012 at 2:20 pmHi David,
Agreed with your last sentence. I think Roderick misinterprets Derrida to make a caricature “cultural studies” argument that Derrida meant by “White Mythology” nothing more than “Western philosophy has to date been of, by, and for Caucasian people.”
I can even see how one might see how that “cultural studies” argument might entail. (Say, perhaps, that metaphysics’ flight to abstraction glosses over legacies and assumptions that are inherent to the European cultural tradition.)
But I don’t think Derrida was being so crass as that, and I do know that Derrida enjoyed using “blanc” as a pun on “blank” — that is, he was concerned for spaces and “blanks” in text as much as content and signs:
http://books.google.com/books?id=EBmZrXKmARQC&lpg=PA64&ots=cPDLdtSK2Y&dq=white%20blanc%20mythology%20derrida&pg=PA64#v=onepage&q=white%20blanc%20mythology%20derrida&f=false
David Buchanan says
March 5, 2012 at 9:48 pmThanks, Daniel. Maybe this is a bit too fanciful – but I’m thinking of those strange locutions where Derrida talks about each of the various “centers” in the history of the metaphysics as “the presence that isn’t present” and they way he talks about the way abstractions depend on the absence of the referent. I mean, his deconstruction of this history suggests that “White Mythology” is much better understood or translated as “Blank Mythology” rather than “Caucasian Mythology”. I think he’s saying that each of the metaphysical posits throughout Western history are always some kind of abstraction, for which there is no referent as such. It’s always absent from the concrete because it’s a generalization about a class or category of the concrete. So the center is always posited as the “real” reality behind appearances. So it’s absent. It’s never known in experience, except as an abstract conception. Blank Mythology.
Having said that, however, I also get the impression that “White Mythology” is white in the sense of being sterile or pure. I know, whiteness and purity in the same sentence – it sounds a little creepy – but I just mean that that same sort of blankness again. At the top of his lecture, Roderick says that Derrida is conducting a Freudian-like project wherein he’s looking for the slips of the tongue in philosophy. He’s looking to see what’s been hidden, left out and marginalized in the construction of our philosophies. And the central myth, if you will, that guides this project is the idea that it’s not a myth, that it’s not built just for the Westerners but rather universal and objectively true or really real or some such conceit. And I guess it would be fair to say that “White Mythology” was just caucasian too in the sense that other mythologies were marginalized or even demonized – as a feature of the pretense to global truth.
Randall Miron says
July 22, 2013 at 5:16 pmDavid, I like your case for reading it as “blank” mythology.